> Subject: What's the secret message?>> The announcement Rocke sent to the list, as well as the press release,> says that>> "Strong cryptography makes the world a safer place.">> But the new DESCHALL homepage itself says that>> "The unknown message is: Strong encryption makes the world a safer place.">> So which is it? Does strong cryptography make the world a safer place,> or does strong encryption make the world a safer place? :-)

Thanks for pointing this out.

The contest provided a fixed, 24-byte ASCII string at the start
of the message: "The unknown message is: "

That was followed by a variable-length message:
"Strong cryptography makes the world a safer place."

That was followed by six pad bytes of 0x06 to bring the total length of
the message to a multiple of 8 bytes.

The clients searched for a key that yielded the first 8 bytes: "The unkn".